


Glitch

by noordinaryperson



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 08:45:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19390612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noordinaryperson/pseuds/noordinaryperson
Summary: It was broken, and he had no want or need for broken things.In which the Riddler delves into AI by building a robotic cat.  Originally written with Arkhamverse!Riddler in mind.





	Glitch

It took him longer than he would have liked to admit to compile the code, if truth be told. He had thought it would be a relatively simple task for a mind as brilliant as his, but as things turn out, teaching something how to think was a bit more difficult than he had anticipated. Only a bit. Nothing was ever, ever too challenging for him.

This was to be his first foray into artificial intelligence, the precursor to something far greater. As soon as he knew that this worked, that he had ironed out all the bugs, he could move on to the project he really wanted to tackle. He glanced at the lines upon lines of code, compiled over countless hours, glanced once more at the robotic figure on the ground next to him, and began the upload.

The process was slow going. He expected it to be. The massive amount of data being transferred from one processor to another took time, and while he didn’t have a ton of that, he certainly had enough for this. He let the upload run its course, and he went about the rest of his day, working on deathtraps, adjusting blueprints, the usual odd jobs. He even found time to dust off his chess board and play a game of chess against himself– he won, of course.

By the time the transfer was complete, the initial excitement had waned somewhat. He no longer had to be worried about his computer or the processor in the new machine overheating or catching fire, so all that was left was to boot the thing up… And he knew that would work. He wasn’t a moron, after all.

It took almost a minute for the robot to flare to life, he noted with some annoyance– perhaps he should have installed another processor after all… Would it be able to keep up with organic impulses with the processing power it had now? But then the machine began moving, righting itself from where it lay on its side on the floor, eyes searching the area, standing on all four legs… It took a few steps, then turned to face him and–

SCREECH.

Well. That was unexpected. He sighed, one hand coming up so fingers could pinch the bridge of his nose. He should have used a better audio card. He hadn’t expected the thing to actually try to meow of its own accord, he had thought it would only do it when commanded. Then again… It was a cat. Well, a robotic cat. And since he had programmed it to be as close to an organic feline as possible, he supposed it should act with a certain… Disregard.

He sat and watched it explore while he ate dinner, watched as it found the the “food” dish he had left out for it in a moment of whimsy, filled with spare nuts and bolts he couldn’t foresee using anytime soon. From there, it wandered over to the cat bed he had built as a wireless charging dock for it, then turned and pounced on one of the toys he had fashioned for it to play with. It seemed he had succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do– creating an artificially intelligent cat. Minus the small error with the voice, of course, but he could fix that just as soon as he ordered new parts.

It wasn’t until later that night that things soured. The cat– he hadn’t bothered to name it, because why should he– was sitting in his lap, purring quietly, then it looked up at him, still purring, and…

SCREECH.

But it didn’t just make that horrific excuse for a meow. It was still purring– or trying to, and he could literally see the green lights that served as its eyes flicker as its whole body stiffened and extended, and it literally toppled off his lap.

Oh.

That was a problem.

He let out a defeated sigh and turned back to his laptop, opening up the code to peer at it again. He was tempted to kick the machine, send it flying across the room, but he didn’t want to scuff his shoes. He couldn’t have made a mistake, there was simply no plausible way, and he knew cats didn’t naturally purr and meow at the same time, so maybe it was a virus?

But how could it have gotten a virus? It wasn’t even Wi-Fi enabled, and there definitely wasn’t a virus on his laptop– he had specifically designed it and built it to make that nigh-impossible. The only person who could possibly dream of getting past his firewall was, well, him. He couldn’t have made a mistake. He had spent hours, no, days working on this programming. He had checked it and re-checked it, there was absolutely no possible way there was an error that caused that to happen….

The robotic feline as back on it’s feet, purring and rubbing against his legs, but he ignored it. He had to figure this out. He had to know what he’d done. Or hadn’t done. He had to fix this, and fix it now.

He thought he found the error at one point, about an hour later. He made an adjustment, plugged the cat back into his computer, re-uploaded everything… And now the damned thing couldn’t even walk. It moved one leg, then another, then another, then the last, giving it some sort of strange, stunted hobble… He reverted to the previous programming and went back to work.

It wasn’t until he woke up with his cheek pressed into the keys of his laptop that he decided to give up. He had been at it for… Oh, hell. If the clock on his computer was right (and he knew for a fact that it was), and judging by the way his body felt, he had slept for maybe four hours, which left thirty-six hours of unaccounted-for time in which he must have been frantically trying to fix this stupid cat. Thirty-six hours, and not a single thing had helped. Quite the contrary, everything he had thought may be a fix served only to cause another problem, or make the thing shut down completely… All that work, wasted, all those materials, wasted….

Purr.

And there was the damned thing again, up on his desk, nuzzling his face and purring, pawing at his hand. He reached out automatically and rubbed its head, which only made the purring intensify. Maybe this stupid glitch was a problem for another day. After all, it seemed as though the feline did function as intended, apart from this strange glitch and the horrific shriek that resulted from him not bothering to program in a proper meow…Maybe some decent sleep would help the solution appear more readily.

He spent the better part of a week working off-and-on on attempting to find a solution for this stupid glitch. The cat, however, seemed unbothered, and spent the time prowling his safe house, doing what he could only assume were cat things, interrupted only by the need to charge its battery and that damned glitch, which he quickly noted seemed to happen more often when the battery was running low. In fact, it happened so often in the hour immediately preceding it retreating to its charging dock that he began referring to it as a glitch instead of a cat– and it was at that point that the robot, however unintentionally, gained a name. And yes, Glitch was a stupid name, but this was a stupid cat. He would fix the problem and get rid of it, and if he couldn’t fix it, he would just deactivate it and move on.

He made it as far as deactivating it one day, a few weeks later. Believing himself to be at his limit, all his resources exhausted, he turned the thing off and gathered up its supplies, leaving it in a corner to be forgotten. He had failed. He had failed, and no one could know about it. He would destroy it, get rid of it before anyone ever even knew it existed, and try again with something different, something less stupid, something that wouldn’t bother him at inopportune moments, looking for attention, something that wouldn’t insist on curling up at the foot of his bed every night, or deliberately worm its way into his lap while he was trying to work…

The house seemed quiet. Had he actually gotten attached to the stupid thing? No, he couldn’t have. It was broken, and he had no want or need for broken things. There was absolutely no reason he was staring at it now, no reason he was walking over to the corner where it lay discarded, definitely no reason he was gently scratching the deactivated machine’s chin…

Damn it.

He sighed. “This changes nothing, Glitch. I still don’t like you.”

But even as he hooked the machine to his laptop once more to reinstall the programming he had wiped from it, he knew that the statement was a lie.


End file.
